Jon Batiste Reviews the 'Ocarina of Time' Remake: 'Welcome Surprises'

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake launched Thursday, and Jon Batiste — one of the few superfans granted early access by Nintendo — has delivered a first verdict: the game keeps its essence while adding what he calls welcome surprises.

"I've gotten to play the new one, and I haven't finished it, but you can sense that there may be some twists, some surprises that are welcome, but it's not gonna be completely different. And that's to its credit," Batiste told Variety at Nintendo's launch event, held Wednesday night at the Nintendo store in New York.

The musician framed the remake in explicitly musical terms. "That's the way a melody or a musical movement, it inspires that generation and you pass it on to the next generation and they take it and take the essence of what resonates for them, but then it's also got some other things that make it really of the now," he said.

Critics' initial response to the remake has been overwhelmingly positive, though it remains too early to gauge the wider gaming public's reaction.

What is the remake, exactly?

Nintendo built the new version exclusively for the Nintendo Switch 2. It reworks the game originally released in 1998 for the Nintendo 64. The story is unchanged in outline: Link must become the Hero of Time and defend the kingdom of Hyrule from Ganondorf, who plots to steal the mythical Triforce from the Sacred Realm and take over the world.

Batiste played the 1998 original as a child, and he credits it with reshaping his idea of what games could be.

"That one opened my whole perception of what a game could be, and I think it did that for a lot of us," he said. "It feels like you're in a universe all its own."

He tied the experience to earlier multiplayer habits — competitions at Street Fighter 2 with his sister and cousins — and argued that Ocarina of Time fused open-world, RPG and action-adventure elements into something new for the canon.

What does Batiste say about the score?

As a musician, he has a particular attachment to the Ocarina of Time soundtrack by composer Koji Kondo. The scores of the games he played became part of his own musical education.

"I started to even play those scores on instruments when I was getting to the age of us really getting into music," Batiste said. "So this was the game that opened my mind to the possibility of what peak gameplay could be."

He said the original shaped his choices about what to play and immerse himself in afterward: "It's like, oh yeah, I'm trying to find that feeling again."

His benchmark for the remake is modest on its face but demanding in practice. "If it doesn't change anything and it just captures that essence and reintroduces that to the world 20 years later, it would already be an amazing achievement," he said.

Note what he did not say: he has not finished the game, and his access came through Nintendo itself. The full test will come from players picking up the Switch 2 version without a launch-event invitation — and from whether Kondo's score, as reworked, carries to a generation that never owned a Nintendo 64.